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Authors: Jeffery Deaver
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piled atop one another and the one on top was folded carefully; it hid his ice-pick weapon, resting near to hand.
This man had been in many different offices at all hours of the day and night. Insurance companies with rows of ghastly gray desks bathed in green fluorescence. CEOs’ offices that were like the finest comp suites in Vegas casinos. Hotels and art galleries. Even some government office buildings. But Hubbard, White & Willis was unique.
At first he’d been impressed with the elegant place. But now, pushing the cart through quiet corridors, he felt belittled. He sensed contempt for people like him, sensed it from the walls themselves. Here, he was nothing. His neck prickled as he walked past a dark portrait of some old man from the 1800s. He wanted to pull out his pick and slash the canvas.
The drapery man’s face was a map of vessels burst in sfistfights on the streets and in the various prisons he’d been incarcerated in and his muscles were dense as a bull’s. He was a professional, of course, but part of him was hoping one of these scrawny prick lawyers, hunched over stacks of books in the offices he passed (no glances, no nods, no smiles—well, fuck you and your mother) … hoping one of them would walk up to him and demand to see a pass or permit so he could shank them through the lung.
But they all remained oblivious to him. An underling.
Not even worth noticing.
Glancing around to make sure no one was approaching, he stepped into the coffee room on the main floor and took a dusty container of Coffee-mate from the back of a storage shelf. In thirty seconds he’d slid out the tape recorder, removed the cassette, put in a new one and replaced the unit in the canister. He knew it was safe in this particular container because he’d observed that the prissy lawyers here insisted on real milk—half-and-half or 2 percent—and wouldn’t think of drinking, or serving their clients, anything artificial. The Coffee-mate tube had been here, untouched, for months.
Making sure the corridor was empty again, the drapery man walked across the hall to Mitchell Reece’s office and, listening carefully for footsteps, checked the receiver of Reece’s phone.
On Saturday night, when he’d been here to steal the promissory note, he’d placed in the handset of the phone unit an Ashika Electronics omnidirectional ambient-filtering microphone and transmitter. The device was roughly the size of a Susan B. Anthony silver dollar. It was, however, considerably more popular and was used by every security, private eye or industrial espionage outfit that could afford the eight-thousand-dollar price tag. This bug broadcast a razor-clear transmission of all of Reece’s conversations on the phone or with anyone else in the office to the radio receiver and tape recorder in the Coffee-mate container across the hall. One feature of the transmitter was that it contained a frequency-canceling feature, which made it virtually invisibleto most commercial bug-detecting sweepers. He checked the battery and found it was still good.
When he was finished he spent another three or four minutes arranging the drapes so they looked nice. This was, after all, his purported job.
He peeled off the gloves and walked out into the halls, which greeted him once again with their silence and their real, or imagined, disdain.
“I suffer from the fallacy of the beautiful woman.” The Lincoln Town Car limo crashed through the meatpacking district in the western part of Greenwich Village, near the river. Taylor leaned sideways to hear Thom Sebastian over the crackly sound of the talk show on the driver’s AM radio.
He continued, “Which is this: that because a woman is attractive she can do no wrong. You think, Christ, the way she lights a cigarette is the right way, the restaurants she picks are the right restaurants, the way she fakes an orgasm—pardon my French—is the right way so
I
must be doing something wrong. For instance,
This man had been in many different offices at all hours of the day and night. Insurance companies with rows of ghastly gray desks bathed in green fluorescence. CEOs’ offices that were like the finest comp suites in Vegas casinos. Hotels and art galleries. Even some government office buildings. But Hubbard, White & Willis was unique.
At first he’d been impressed with the elegant place. But now, pushing the cart through quiet corridors, he felt belittled. He sensed contempt for people like him, sensed it from the walls themselves. Here, he was nothing. His neck prickled as he walked past a dark portrait of some old man from the 1800s. He wanted to pull out his pick and slash the canvas.
The drapery man’s face was a map of vessels burst in sfistfights on the streets and in the various prisons he’d been incarcerated in and his muscles were dense as a bull’s. He was a professional, of course, but part of him was hoping one of these scrawny prick lawyers, hunched over stacks of books in the offices he passed (no glances, no nods, no smiles—well, fuck you and your mother) … hoping one of them would walk up to him and demand to see a pass or permit so he could shank them through the lung.
But they all remained oblivious to him. An underling.
Not even worth noticing.
Glancing around to make sure no one was approaching, he stepped into the coffee room on the main floor and took a dusty container of Coffee-mate from the back of a storage shelf. In thirty seconds he’d slid out the tape recorder, removed the cassette, put in a new one and replaced the unit in the canister. He knew it was safe in this particular container because he’d observed that the prissy lawyers here insisted on real milk—half-and-half or 2 percent—and wouldn’t think of drinking, or serving their clients, anything artificial. The Coffee-mate tube had been here, untouched, for months.
Making sure the corridor was empty again, the drapery man walked across the hall to Mitchell Reece’s office and, listening carefully for footsteps, checked the receiver of Reece’s phone.
On Saturday night, when he’d been here to steal the promissory note, he’d placed in the handset of the phone unit an Ashika Electronics omnidirectional ambient-filtering microphone and transmitter. The device was roughly the size of a Susan B. Anthony silver dollar. It was, however, considerably more popular and was used by every security, private eye or industrial espionage outfit that could afford the eight-thousand-dollar price tag. This bug broadcast a razor-clear transmission of all of Reece’s conversations on the phone or with anyone else in the office to the radio receiver and tape recorder in the Coffee-mate container across the hall. One feature of the transmitter was that it contained a frequency-canceling feature, which made it virtually invisibleto most commercial bug-detecting sweepers. He checked the battery and found it was still good.
When he was finished he spent another three or four minutes arranging the drapes so they looked nice. This was, after all, his purported job.
He peeled off the gloves and walked out into the halls, which greeted him once again with their silence and their real, or imagined, disdain.
“I suffer from the fallacy of the beautiful woman.” The Lincoln Town Car limo crashed through the meatpacking district in the western part of Greenwich Village, near the river. Taylor leaned sideways to hear Thom Sebastian over the crackly sound of the talk show on the driver’s AM radio.
He continued, “Which is this: that because a woman is attractive she can do no wrong. You think, Christ, the way she lights a cigarette is the right way, the restaurants she picks are the right restaurants, the way she fakes an orgasm—pardon my French—is the right way so
I
must be doing something wrong. For instance,
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